7,665 research outputs found
Electronically-switched Directional Antennas for Low-power Wireless Networks: A Prototype-driven Evaluation
We study the benefits of electronically-switched directional antennas in low-power wireless networks. This antenna technology may improve energy efficiency by increasing the communication range and by alleviating contention in directions other than the destination, but in principle requires a dedicated network stack. Unlike most existing works, we start by characterizing a real-world antenna prototype, and apply this to an existing low-power wireless stack, which we adapt with minimal changes. Our results show that: i) the combination of a low-cost directional antenna and a conventional network stack already brings significant performance improvements, e.g., nearly halving the radio-on time per delivered packet; ii) the margin of improvement available to alternative clean-slate protocol designs is similarly large and concentrated in the control rather than the data plane; iii) by artificially modifying our antenna's link-layer model, we can point at further potential benefits opened by different antenna designs
Connectivity of confined 3D Networks with Anisotropically Radiating Nodes
Nodes in ad hoc networks with randomly oriented directional antenna patterns
typically have fewer short links and more long links which can bridge together
otherwise isolated subnetworks. This network feature is known to improve
overall connectivity in 2D random networks operating at low channel path loss.
To this end, we advance recently established results to obtain analytic
expressions for the mean degree of 3D networks for simple but practical
anisotropic gain profiles, including those of patch, dipole and end-fire array
antennas. Our analysis reveals that for homogeneous systems (i.e. neglecting
boundary effects) directional radiation patterns are superior to the isotropic
case only when the path loss exponent is less than the spatial dimension.
Moreover, we establish that ad hoc networks utilizing directional transmit and
isotropic receive antennas (or vice versa) are always sub-optimally connected
regardless of the environment path loss. We extend our analysis to investigate
boundary effects in inhomogeneous systems, and study the geometrical reasons
why directional radiating nodes are at a disadvantage to isotropic ones.
Finally, we discuss multi-directional gain patterns consisting of many equally
spaced lobes which could be used to mitigate boundary effects and improve
overall network connectivity.Comment: 12 pages, 10 figure
Understanding Link Dynamics in Wireless Sensor Networks with Dynamically Steerable Directional Antennas
Abstract. By radiating the power in the direction of choice, electronicallyswitched directional (ESD) antennas can reduce network contention and avoid packet loss. There exists some ESD antennas for wireless sensor networks, but so far researchers have mainly evaluated their directionality. There are no studies regarding the link dynamics of ESD antennas, in particular not for indoor deployments and other scenarios where nodes are not necessarily in line of sight. Our long-term experiments confirm that previous findings that have demonstrated the dependence of angleof-arrival on channel frequency also hold for directional transmissions with ESD antennas. This is important for the design of protocols for wireless sensor networks with ESD antennas: the best antenna direction, i.e., the direction that leads to the highest packet reception rate and signal strength at the receiver, is not stable but varies over time and with the selected IEEE 802.15.4 channel. As this requires protocols to incorporate some form of adaptation, we present an intentionally simple and yet efficient mechanism for selecting the best antenna direction at run-time with an energy overhead below 2 % compared to standard omni-directional transmissions.
A Self-Organization Framework for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks as Small Worlds
Motivated by the benefits of small world networks, we propose a
self-organization framework for wireless ad hoc networks. We investigate the
use of directional beamforming for creating long-range short cuts between
nodes. Using simulation results for randomized beamforming as a guideline, we
identify crucial design issues for algorithm design. Our results show that,
while significant path length reduction is achievable, this is accompanied by
the problem of asymmetric paths between nodes. Subsequently, we propose a
distributed algorithm for small world creation that achieves path length
reduction while maintaining connectivity. We define a new centrality measure
that estimates the structural importance of nodes based on traffic flow in the
network, which is used to identify the optimum nodes for beamforming. We show,
using simulations, that this leads to significant reduction in path length
while maintaining connectivity.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technolog
Demo Abstract: Smart Antennas Made Practical: The SPIDA Way
WISENET (NES)CONE
Optimal fault-tolerant placement of relay nodes in a mission critical wireless network
The operations of many critical infrastructures (e.g., airports) heavily depend on proper functioning of the radio communication network supporting operations. As a result, such a communication network is indeed a mission-critical communication network that needs adequate protection from external electromagnetic interferences. This is usually done through radiogoniometers. Basically, by using at least three suitably deployed radiogoniometers and a gateway gathering information from them, sources of electromagnetic emissions that are not supposed to be present in the monitored area can be localised. Typically, relay nodes are used to connect radiogoniometers to the gateway. As a result, some degree of fault-tolerance for the network of relay nodes is essential in order to offer a reliable monitoring. On the other hand, deployment of relay nodes is typically quite expensive. As a result, we have two conflicting requirements: minimise costs while guaranteeing a given fault-tolerance. In this paper address the problem of computing a deployment for relay nodes that minimises the relay node network cost while at the same time guaranteeing proper working of the network even when some of the relay nodes (up to a given maximum number) become faulty (fault-tolerance). We show that the above problem can be formulated as a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) as well as a Pseudo-Boolean Satisfiability (PB-SAT) optimisation problem and present experimental results com- paring the two approaches on realistic scenarios
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